Pool:Terrible Beauty I/Strasna Ljepota I

2004 DVD 7 Min

Two brief glimpses from Bosnia, which remind us so succinctly,
that while human society has its successes and travails, the natural
world continues unchanging. In ’Storm’, rain dashes
on the windows of the taxi and as thunder rumbles, the driver sings
to a tender song. Through his half open window we see the comfortable
houses, the parked cars and destroyed buildings of faith speed by.

A roadway patch of water becomes in ‘Pool’, a mute observer
and a passive recipient of the human scene; it will adapt and survive.

Peter Allam

Nicola Atkinson.Davidson interviewed by Bob Collins

NESTA fellow Nicola Atkinson.Davidson travelled to Bosnia in July
2004 to create a series of artworks entitled ‘Terrible Beauty’
to reflect the experiences of Bosnians today. During her trip Nicola
created two video pieces which she shared with the communities she
met. Her resulting work – two short films titled Pool and
Storm – struck an emotional chord with those affected by the
war, and represented a new creative step for her.

“I spent three days in Mostar and three days in Sarajevo.
I’d never been to a place that had been recently traumatised
by war. Someone prepared me for how hard it might be by saying that
I’d probably be crying the whole time. But I stayed alert,
and absorbed everything.

When I’m creating work like that, I’m in an extremely
heightened state. It’s unlike the way I am at any other time.
Everything’s stripped away and I feel almost vulnerable.

Part of my remit was to do a piece for the Bosnian communities.
When you go somewhere as an artist, you go with trepidation, hoping
to be inspired to produce the work. Essentially I was given the
whole country as my canvas.
I decided I wanted to do something that bore a relationship to the
war, but that was also forward-looking. I didn’t want to ghettoise
the notion of refugees. I wanted to find something universal in
their experience.

I came across my inspiration totally by chance. I was videotaping
all the time while I was out there. I didn’t even know I was
going to use the footage. But I was walking around Mostar the day
after the Mostar Bridge was reopened, and I saw this pool of water
and began filming it. A man walked past and threw his cigarette
into it. As the water flowed it divided and rejoined again. It was
like two people, or two hearts, becoming separate, and then reforming.

That was it. You see something, and then suddenly you begin to
see it everywhere.

Water became my dominant theme. My second piece featured water
and happened by chance too. I was filming my driver, Viteskic Samir,
as we drove through a storm. He was singing an old Bosnian song,
and outside you could hear the storm and see the changing landscape,
with all these new buildings rising up next to the ones destroyed
by the war. And surrounding it all was the permanence of the weather
and the natural world.

I’ve always believed that capturing something in the corner
of your eye is your true inspiration. Maybe you worry that the moment
you’ve captured is too small to mean anything. But I had faith
that even a single moment, like a point of light reflecting off
a moving mirror, can be important.

I hoped that I’d created something that Bosnians would actually
want to have and be a part of: something that had a weight of understanding
to it, but which also conveyed that weight without making explicit
reference to the war.

At first, using video felt risky. Video work is often only appreciated
in a museum context. I showed it to people whose knowledge of video
is from watching television and movies – they’re much
more critical of it as an art form. But they said “We’ve
never thought about this, it’s so unusual. It speaks to us
completely”. It was very important to me that they appreciated
it. The fact that they liked it and understood it was amazing.”

Sponsors :- Arts
Council England, Bosnia UK Network and The
Public has been at the forefront of community arts development
working on projects with a wide range of people from young people
excluded from school to those living on a local estate to homeless
people.